Bamboo at SHARE 2012 - Day 3; Preparing for the Next SharePoint Now; Office 2010 or Office 365?

There's nothing like a few days with family to make you really appreciate your job. - Dooley

Top News StoriesSharePoint, I Love You (KMWorld)I could have started and finished this article on a Post-It note: Dear SharePoint, I love you. Do you love me? —signed everybody. That conquering sound you hear is SharePoint, and it is nothing short of apocalyptic. You'll see it mentioned elsewhere a couple times in this White Paper: The fastest growing business application in Microsoft history (making it pretty much everyone's history), 20,000 SharePoint users have been added every day for the last five years. That's kind of astonishing.

Eight Ways To Prepare For The Next Release Of SharePoint Now (The Street)SharePoint is a rapidly expanding platform for enterprise collaboration, with a new release already on the horizon. Only two years after the release of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft is gradually revealing details on what users can expect in the next version, which many anticipate will be available in early 2013. With widespread expectations beginning to surface around social capabilities, the cloud, and a new interface, the early anticipation indicates users are already thinking about what’s next for SharePoint. As organizations start considering the next version, there are many ways they can prepare the environment to gain immediate benefits now, and be ready to quickly take advantage of new features later.

Office 2010 or Office 365? (ITProPortal)Microsoft Office 365 can greatly reduce business IT costs, should a company require the complete package but what if a business only requires Microsoft Office without the Lync, Exchange or SharePoint components, would Office 365 still be worth having? A recent discussion was overheard between two IT engineers who felt that for people requiring office applications only, there were no real savings that could be made using Office 365 assuming only Microsoft Office Professional was required. Both engineers felt that all companies should have Office 365 Plan E3 as an absolute minimum even if the benefits of Email, Lync or SharePoint were not required. The engineers felt that the E3 offering was the only viable plan as it included Microsoft Office Professional Plus for the desktop and should there be a connectivity issue, it would allow users to work on their documents offline. In addition they felt that Microsoft Office web apps were not powerful enough to handle anything more than basic documents. As of writing, the cost of Office 365 E3 is £13.25 per month per user.

Say Hello to Windows Azure, The World’s Most Misunderstood Cloud (Wired)Jeremy Howard sees Silicon Valley as an echo chamber. He recently moved to Northern California from Australia, looking to improve the fortunes of his startup, an ingenious operation known as Kaggle, and he soon found that most Silicon Valley software developers behaved like other Silicon Valley software developers. “In this echo chamber which is the [San Francisco] Bay Area, unless you follow what everyone else does, then there’s an assumption that you don’t know what you’re doing,” Howard says.

Wozniak Endorses Windows Phone, Says Lumia 900 the Reincarnation of Steve Jobs (Gotta be Mobile)In a bit of controversy and publicity, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak had picked up the Nokia Lumia 900 flagship smartphone using Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. Though Wozniak says that the iPhone is still his favorite device of choice, the Apple co-founder has demonstrated that he can be objective in his rivals’ products and was noted in recent history to have secured a pre-release Google Galaxy Nexus smartphone prior to that device’s release from Google in Mountain View, California. With the Lumia 900, Wozniak praised the smartphone for its intuitive experience and design and speedy interface.

Around Bamboo NationSHARE 2012: 'From Simple Search to Knowledge Management' with Bamboo's Julie Auletta (The Bamboo Team Blog)Julie Auletta, Director of Bamboo's Solutions Center, presented an early morning "breakfast and coffee talk" at SHARE today on the topic From Simple Search to Knowledge Management. Typically, one of the challenges Julie faces is how to transfer a known process into a SharePoint solution, and it's her job to bridge that gap on behalf of Bamboo's customers. Julie explained that prospective customers come to her with a problem, and wanting to know which Bamboo product will solve their problem. It often turns out that SharePoint out-of-the-box can ease their pain, and Julie's happy to give them the good news in such cases. In other cases, the solution (or product) that prospective customers initially sought may not end up being what's required in order to ease their pain, and that's why Bamboo's Solutions Center exists: to help customers solve SharePoint problems that neither SharePoint or existing Bamboo products can solve out-of-the-box.

SHARE 2012: Christian Buckley Identifies 'The Connection Between Metadata, Social Tools, and Personal Productivity' (The Bamboo Team Blog)This morning at SHARE, Christian Buckley began his session on The Connection Between Metadata, Social Tools, and Personal Productivity by mentioning that the presentation was the direct result of conversations he's had with members of the SharePoint community. Beginning another conversation, this one with his near-capacity SHARE audience, Christian asked, "How productive are your end users? Anyone feel like they're getting optimal performance?" Somewhat surprisingly, one hand was raised, but that person almost immediately qualified her response by saying, "Well, maybe not optimal..."

Access Exchange Online 2010 Mailboxes with Your On-premises Deployment via Team Calendar Web Part (The Bamboo Team Blog)Bamboo has just released Team Calendar Web Part version 1.7, and one of the exciting new features is Exchange 2010 Online support for your on-premises deployment of SharePoint. Upon successfully installing (or upgrading, if you are already an owner of Team Calendar Web Part), open the Toolpane and locate the new section, Server Topology. In this section you have two options:

Around the BlogosphereApril 2012 CU for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 has been Released (Stefan Goßner)The product group released the April 2012 Cumulative Update for the SharePoint 2007 and 2010 product family. The April Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2010 is a Post-SP1 hotfix. That means that you should ensure that SP1 is installed before the April CU. The April Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2007 is a Post-SP3 hotfix. That means that you should ensure that SP3 is installed before the April CU.

What’s Faster? Querying a SharePoint List or Querying the Managed Metadata Service? (The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife)What the doohickey am I talking about? Well, if you’re a SharePoint Developer that is tasked with using SharePoint to house referential metadata, you used to have 1 option. Prior to SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Lists were typically used to store this information. By using Lists as the datastore for referential information, we were able to easily provide end users with the ability to manage this information without having to spend any time creating a UI for them. This also enabled the end users to create and manage values which could then be consumed by various applications whether it be basic SharePoint List Forms via Lookup columns, InfoPath forms or custom Web Parts and ASP.NET forms.

Understand SharePoint Governance Perceptions (EndUserSharePoint)SharePoint governance, simply put, is a set of guidelines for how SharePoint will be used within an organization. It is a set of rules and procedures to help inform deployment, configuration, and management of SharePoint. Proper SharePoint governance assigns responsibilities to various members of the organization to ensure that SharePoint runs smoothly. In short, SharePoint governance determines how SharePoint will run, who will do it, and what equipment will be used.

When to Choose SPServices vs. the Client Side Object Model (CSOM) (SharePointDevWiki)Mark Rackley (@MrAckley) and I had a Twonversation with Jeff Jones (@SPJeff) about a month ago about when it is good to use SharePoint’s Client Side Object Model (CSOM) over SPServices. You can see the important bits of that conversation in the image below. (Yeah, it’s taken us forever to get this post done. I blame Mark.) In fact, Mark and I often are asked “When should you use SPServices vs. the CSOM?” Both technologies are script-based, and both allow you to talk to SharePoint through its Web Services. However, there are some important differences to consider when you are deciding which to use.

Issue Downloading SharePoint 2010 Prerequisite Installer Files (SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans)Strictly speaking this quick article doesn’t really have anything to with SharePoint, but hopefully it might help-out someone out there in SharePoint land. One of the projects I’m currently working on is a 2010 Farm build, we are just getting the media set ready to install SharePoint with AutoSPInstaller, and of course need to download the Pre-Requisite Installer Files. For this particular project I have no local access to the servers so everything is being done by RDP on the server. So to download the Pre-Requisite Installer Files I’m was using this script from codeplex, but it was failing with a really weird error:

SharePoint Administrator - San Diego, CAAs the primary Microsoft SharePoint Administrator, this position will be responsible for the architecture, administration, configuration, and monitoring of the environment for a multi-server, service-delivery oriented SharePoint Farm. Works with business units and other IT staff, including the project management team, to understand business needs in the SharePoint environment, and analyze, design, and implement effective systems solutions.

Microsoft UpdatesImporting SharePoint 2010 Site Definitions in Visual Studio 2010 (MSDN)Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 provides a project type that enables you to import a site definition and add code. You can then deploy this site definition to the SharePoint Solutions Gallery and create new sites based on the site definition.

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About Chris Dooley

As Marketing Manager for Bamboo Solutions, Chris Dooley is responsible for overseeing all marketing efforts made towards identifying, creating, and evaluating strategies to promote the services and products offered by the company. He brings more than eight years of marketing experience to his position, with a strong focus on social media marketing stemming from his time of employment with America Online prior to Bamboo Solutions. During his time with AOL as a Senior Program Manager, Chris was responsible for creating the advertising processes for AOL Messaging and Social Media and co- founded AOL’s ComicsAlliance. In his role as Marketing Manager for Bamboo Solutions, he continues to carry out his extensive knowledge of social media marketing by establishing the need for the company’s products and services worldwide through emphasizing and initiating global marketing efforts. Chris studied Programming at Georgia Perimeter College.